the blame I acknowledge, quite well. I don't believe I'm any worse
than the run of mankind, and whether I am or not, I've made all the
amends I can and I have nothing more to say."
His eyeglass had dropped; his face looked worn; he showed his age more
than a happier man would have done at his years His mood of thinking it
out by himself continued for so long that Bulstrode finally asked:
"What, if I may be so near you as to question, do you mean, old chap,
to do?"
Westboro' had it all laid out for himself--his ready answer showed it.
"You say I'm not a lover," he reminded his friend; "no doubt you're
right, but I'm an affectionate chap, at any rate, I can't bear this--"
He looked about hopelessly. The words were forced out by the high mark
of his unhappiness: "--this infernal solitude. Even when a good
comrade like yourself is in it, the house seems to speak to me from the
empty rooms in this wing." (Bulstrode knew he was thinking of the
nurseries with the low latches and little gates.) "I can't stand it.
When I get out of England and abroad the place fetches me back again
like a magnet. I'm a home-keeping sort of man, and I want my home."
His friend gently urged in the silence: "Well?"
"I shall wait," the Duke went on with the plan he had been forced to
make out for himself. "I shall hold on, keep along a bit, and then--_I
shall go to the other woman_." And the Duke, as he raised his eyes to
his companion, fixed his glass firmly and felt that he challenged in
every way Bulstrode's disapproval. "The Duchess will get her
divorce--it goes without saying--will get her divorce. Why she has not
already done so I can't imagine."
As Westboro' appeared inclined to leave the subject there, Bulstrode
pressed him further: "And then?"
"I fancy I shall marry the other woman."
Bulstrode started. The complexion of the idea was so foreign to him
that he could not for a moment let himself think that he understood it.
"You will," he said, "marry one woman whilst you distinctly love
another?"
The Duke nodded. "Love," he reflected, "I begin to believe I don't
know anything about. It must, of course, suppose some sort of return.
If, as you say, I love another woman, I'm not made of the stuff that
can go along doing so without anything on her side."
The dressing clock at the bedside on the little stand chimed the hour.
It was two o'clock. The Duke of Westboro' rose.
"You must think me a colossal ass, my dear friend, but if it had not
been for your awfully good companionship and your kindness, I dare say
that by now I should have already made some sort of fatal blunder."
At the door Bulstrode put his hand on his friend's arm, and, as though
nothing in the conversation apart from the Duchess had any real
significance, he said simply:
"You are then, in sum, simply waiting...?"
"Oh, yes," agreed the other rather blankly. And the other man knew
that he had been told only half the thought in his friend's mind.
"She may get a divorce at any time, you know, quite easily, without my
taking any further steps."
"Oh, I see perfectly," Jimmy accepted; and as the door closed after his
host, he said, almost aloud: "He thinks, then, there is half a chance
that the Duchess will return." And wondering very much how far a woman
is willing to sacrifice herself for a man, granted that she loves him,
he did not finish his phrase.
The next day Bulstrode, no longer able to resist the beckoning country,
went out, as it were, to it as if he said "Here I am--what will you do
with me?"
If Glousceshire could, for a while, make him forget the problems he had
been housed with, brush him up a bit, he thought it would be a good
thing. Therefore, when his horse came up to the door he threw himself
on the animal in a nervous haste to be gone, and setting off in the
direction of Penhaven, obeyed its summons at last.
Westboro' had run up to London for overnight, and Bulstrode, at the
Duke's something more than invitation, a sort of appeal, was to stay
indefinitely on. It must be confessed that he rather selfishly looked
forward to the course of an untroubled afternoon, to an evening amongst
the books whose files had tempted him for days.
But the pity of all he had sympathetically been closeted with was great
in his mind. Whereas his native delicacy and slow judgment had led him
to keep silent until now towards his host, it was in no wise because
Jimmy had not quite made up his mind that he would not spare Westboro'
at all when the moment, if it ever came, should present itself for him
to speak.
As he rode along he thought of the Duchess naturally in Paris,
surrounded by a train of ardent admirers; she had them always,
everywhere. She was disillusioned, of course, probably angry, piqued,
and unfortunately she had been betrayed; and he shrugged with a gentle
desperation as he made a mental picture of the last scene: the
inevitable divorce, the wrecking of another household,
unless--unless--one of them loved sufficiently to save the situation.
His thoughts came to a standstill as his horse stopped short before a
gate: his riding had fetched him up before it. The mare stretched out
her long neck, set free by a relaxing rein; she sniffed the latch and
put her head over the wicket, and the rider saw that they had come
across fields, and were at the entrance of a deserted property. The
gate gave access to a forest road where the thick underbrush was
untidy, and on whose walk the piles of leaves lay as they had fallen.
He could see no farther in, and thinking to come at the end upon a
forsaken garden, the precincts of an untenanted country house, he
leaned down, tried the gate which fairly swung into his hand, and the
mare passed through. There was the delicious intimacy about the woods
which the sense of coming alone and unexpectedly upon the old and
forsaken gives the traveller. He is a discoverer of secrets, a
legitimate spy upon stories which he flatters himself he is the first
to read. He becomes intimate with another man's past, and as he must
necessarily, in all ignorance, tell himself his own tales, indiscretion
may be said to be a doubtful quantity.
A bit back in the bare brown woods he saw the flash of a marble pillar;
it shone white and clear in the setting of russet and against the boles
of the trees. A little farther away gleamed another figure on its base
of fluted marble, and still farther along, leaf-overlaid and thus
effaced, he could discern the contour of a sunken garden. The place
grew more pretentious as he slowly picked his way, and he was
unprepared for coming suddenly onto a gravel path from which he thought
the leaves had been blown away. Here Bulstrode dismounted, and, with
the bridle over his arm, walked towards the path's end, pleasantly
interested, and now, as he thought it should by this do, the house
struck on him through an archway contrived by the training of old trees
over a circle of stone. The house broke on him in the shape of an
Elizabethan manse; long and old with soft rose-color of brick in
places, and the color of a faded leaf in others where the dampness had
soaked in and had, through countless mid-summer suns, been burned out
again. Before the windows flashed the red of bright curtains. The
house was distinctly, and he thought it seemed happily, occupied. He
stopped where he stood by the arch, a little confused and a little
balked in his romantic treat, and not the less feeling himself an
intruder. But before he could turn his horse and unobtrusively lead
her back the way they had come, the house's occupant, no doubt she who
gave it the air of being so happily tenanted, had come out with a
garden hat on her head, a pair of garden shears in her hands, and with
the precision of intention, turned sharply towards the arched forest
walk, and in this way squarely upon Bulstrode.
The surprise to him was, without doubt, the greater, for she knew him
at once, and he for a second did not recognize her. Her extreme
English air--the straw hat tied under her chin and the face it framed,
so decidedly altered, bewildered him. His first greeting, mentally,
before he spoke aloud to her, was masculine. "Why, her beauty! What
in heaven's name had she done with it?"
"_What_ are you doing here?"
They both asked it at once, and the lady having lived so long in an
insular country was adept in its possibilities of great hospitality as
well as of freezing out an unwelcome visitor. She froze the poor
gentleman and then, touched by his utter bewilderment and his innocence
of wilful intrusion, she smiled more humanly.
"Won't you, since you _are_ here, Mr. Bulstrode, come in and have a cup
of tea?"
She at once followed their mutual question by saying: "As for being
here, you will admit that given the part of the country it is, no one
has a better right!"
"Oh, I'll admit anything you like," he laughed, "if you'll only admit
us. You see we are two."
The lady came up to him in a more friendly manner; she gave him her
hand and she really smiled beautifully. Then she put her hand on the
nose of the horse, with the touch one has for familiar things.
"She's a perfect dear, isn't she--a dear. So you are riding her then?
Well, you'll find her easy to tie, she stands well. There's nothing
she can spoil, that's the charm of such an old, tumble-down place."
As Bulstrode followed after the trailing dress just touching the gravel
with a rustling sound, he had the feeling of being suddenly,
willy-nilly, taken and put into the heart of a story book. He smiled.
"Well, I've done the first chapter and now I've got to go on in the
book, I suppose, whether I want to be here or not, to the end."
"I thought I was making a voyage of discovery," he told her as they sat
in the low room before a fire and before her table and tea cups. "I
fancied I was the only person within miles round. I expect no one has
a right to be so bold, but I really didn't dream the place was lived
in, as, of course, you know."
"Drink your tea," she bade, "and eat your toast before I make you tell
me if you have come to see me as a messenger."
"And if I have?"
It was delicious tea, and the American of her had somehow found cream
for it, which, un-English luxury, the American in him fully
appreciated. The liquid in the blue-and-white cups was pale as saffron
and the toast was a feather.
"At five o'clock there's nothing like it in the world," he breathed.
"I didn't hope for this to-day. I had recklessly thrown five o'clock
over, for I'm alone at the castle." He drank his tea, finished, and
with a sigh. Then he said: "I can actually venture to ask you for
another cup, for I am nobody's messenger or envoy, my dear, nobody's.
I'm just an indiscreet, humdrum individual who has been too charmingly
rewarded for an intrusion. You saw my surprise, didn't you? And I'm
not very clever at putting on things."
The Duchess tacitly accepted, it is to be supposed, for she made him a
second cup of tea, slowly.
"You don't know that I've been thinking about you all day," he said,
"and I can frankly say that I've been making a very different picture
of you indeed."
She took no notice whatsoever of his personality.
"You are in England, then," she said rather formally. "I never think
of my own country people as being here. I always think of Americans as
being in the States, men above all, for they fit so badly in the
English atmosphere, don't they? It's always incongruous to me to hear
their "r's" and "a's" rattling about in this soft language. It's
horrid of me to speak so. You, of course, are out of the category.
But as you stood there, with Banshee's nose over your shoulder you
fitted quite beautifully in with everything. I don't believe I should
mind you, ever, anywhere, and yet I more naturally think of you at
Newport, don't you see?"
Her companion cried: "Oh, no, I'm in England, and you can't alter the
fact, at least if you can, please don't; for Newport on the fifteenth
of December, and with no such tea or fire----"
"Oh," she permitted, "you may stay. I said you fitted--only----"
Bulstrode interposed: "Don't at least for a few moments entertain any
'buts' and 'onlys'--they are nearly as bad as those magical travelling
trunks that would transport me to the United States. It is so--let me
say--neutral in this place, I should think I might remain. I don't
know why you are here or with whom, nor for how long, or for how deep,
but it is singularly perfect to have found you."
His hostess had left her seat behind the table, and taking a chair by
the fireside where Bulstrode was sitting, undid the ribbons of her
garden hat and let the basket-like object fall on the floor.
"You must promise me, first of all, that you will not say you have seen
me. Otherwise I shall leave here to-morrow and nobody shall ever again
know where I am."
However her command might conflict with what was in his mind, he was
obliged to give her his word. He had no right not to do so.
"And nothing," she said, "must make you break this promise, Mr.
Bulstrode. I know how good you are, and how you do all sorts of
Quixotic funny things, but in this case please--please----"
"Mind my own business?" he nodded. "I will, Duchess, I will."
She looked at him steadily a moment and seemed satisfied, for she
relaxed the tensity of her manner, which was the first Americanism she
had displayed, and in her pretty soft drawl asked him, with less
perfunctory interest than her words implied: "You are at Westboro'?"
"Yes, since the twenty-fifth."
"And you're staying on?"
"I seem to be more or less of a fixture--until the holidays, I expect."
"Lucky you," she breathed, and at his expression of candid surprise she
half laughed. "Oh, I mean as far as the castle goes--isn't it really
too delightful?"
He was able to say honestly: "Quite the most beautiful house I have
ever seen."
"Yes, I think so too," she nodded. "It's not so important as many
others but it's more perfect, more like a home."
Bulstrode sat back in his chair and tried to make her forget him.
Between the fire and the shadow he wanted to watch her face from which
he now saw that the beauty he remembered had not faded but had been
transformed. She was beautiful in another way: the brilliant, blooming
girl, fully blown at eighteen, with the dazzling charm of health, no
longer existed in the Duchess of Westboro'. She had refined very much
indeed. The aggressive bearing of the American princess had been
replaced by the colder, more serene hauteur of the English Duchess.
She was evidently a very proud woman, the arch of her brows said so,
and the line of her lips. All her lines were sharper and finer. Her
color, and he could not, as he studied her, quite regret it; her color
was quite gone. Her pallor made her more delicate, and her eyes--it
was in them that Bulstrode thought he saw the greatest change of all;
they were now fixed upon him, there was something melancholy in their
profound and deeply circled gray.
"What rooms will they have given you?" she asked after a moment.
Then--"Wait," she commanded, "I know. The south wing, the Henry IV.
rooms that look into the gardens. I always gave those to the men.
There's something extremely homelike about them, don't you think so?
And have you ever seen anything like those winter roses in that court?
Did any bloom this year? The trellis runs up along the terrace
balustrade--or possibly you don't care for flowers? Of course you
wouldn't as a girl does."
A _girl_--with that face and those eyes? Why, she must have been
talking back ten years. Bulstrode drew a breath.
"I know the roses you mean. It would be difficult to forget them.
Your gardener takes such pride in them. For some reason they are never
gathered; they fall as they hang. The gardener, it so happened, told
me so."
She was looking at him with an intensity almost painful, but she said
nothing further, and after a moment more Bulstrode replied to another
question.
"As it happens I don't occupy the Henry IV. rooms. I have mine quite
on the other side of the castle. Don't they call them the 'West
Rooms'?"
She caught her breath a little, but she was in splendid training with
all her years of English life behind her. Her face, nevertheless,
showed how well she knew those rooms, without the added note in her
voice as she said:
"Oh, those West Rooms--you have those."
And in the quiet that fell as her eyes sought the fire, he quite knew
how her thoughts travelled down the hall to the open nursery doors with
their waiting gates. Whatever were her reasons for being here,
Bulstrode saw that he had surprised her in a moment of sadness, and
that his visit in spite of his indiscretion, was not wholly unwelcome.
But in the sudden way coming upon some one connected with her own life,
she had been completely taken unawares, and her lapse into something
like sentiment was short. Even as he looked at her she hardened.
"You have naturally not asked me anything, Mr. Bulstrode," she said,
coldly enough now, "and more naturally still I have no explanations to
give. By to-morrow I may be gone. I may live here for the rest of my
life. I never leave my garden, I am quite unknown to the people about.
If any one in Westboro' learns that I am here I shall leave at once.
You will not come again. It is discourteous to say so--to ask it."
He had risen from his chair.
"Oh, but it's quite, quite dark. However will you manage?"
"We'll pick our way back well enough," he assured her. "The distance
to the road is nothing, and from here on it runs straight to the abbey."
The Duchess followed him slowly to the door, and there she asked
abruptly: "Is Westboro' to be down all winter? I didn't know it. I
thought he was out of England or I should not have come here at all."
"Oh," Bulstrode answered, "he's too restless to be long anywhere. I
expect he'll pack up and be off before we know it. He's away just now
at any rate, and I'm kicking my heels up there quite alone. I'm not to
return--ever?" he ventured. "You may so fully trust me that--" and he
saw that she hesitated and pursued, "I shall ride up to the little gate
again, and if it is unlatched...."
"Oh, don't count on it," she advised him, "don't--it's against all my
plans."
Somebody in the shape of a lad had unfastened the mare, and preceded
Bulstrode on foot with a lantern, by whose flicker, with much delicate
caution and pretended shyness, Banshee picked her way to the road,
through the woods which Bulstrode an hour before had fancied led into a
deserted garden.
"You see," he put it to her delicacy to understand, "it's scarcely, in
a way, fair to him--I feel it so at least. It gives me the sensation
of knowing more than he does in his own house about that which
presumably should be Westboro's secret."
"You mean to say,"--the Duchess pinned him down, "that you'll give me
away because of one of those peculiar crises of honor that makes a
person betray a trust in order to salve his conscience?"
Bulstrode had come again faithfully, making the pilgrimage to the
forest road, and he was not surprised that it should have finally
turned out so that one day the gate yielded to his touch, and he found
the Duchess if not waiting for him, distinctly there. During their
delightful little talks--and they had been so--not once had the name of
Bulstrode's host been mentioned; and if the lady had a curiosity
concerning her lord and once master, she did not display it to the
visitor.
"I mean to say," Bulstrode replied in answer to her challenge which was
fiery, "that I really don't want to play false to Westboro', more false
than I shall in the course of events be forced to be. Of course, your
secret--I need not say so--is entirely safe. But the Duke comes back
in a day or two, and rather than face him with this silence which you
have imposed upon me I am going back to London before he returns."
The sewing she had chosen to finger--a Duchess, and an American one at
that, is not expected to do more--lay at her feet. By her side was a
basket of considerable proportions, and it was full to the brim with
linen: the very fine white stuff overflowed from the basket like snow.
The Duchess of Westboro's handiwork had already caught the eye of her
guest. And now, as her long hands and her long finger, tipped by its
golden thimble, handled her sewing, Bulstrode watched her interestedly
and found great loveliness in her bending face.
"I didn't think any of you knew how to sew," he mused aloud.
"Any of us!" she smiled. "Do you, by that, mean American Duchesses?
Or do you mean women who have left their husbands? Or in just what
class do you think of me, regarding your last remark?"
She folded up her work and dropped her thimble in the nest of snow.
Bulstrode acknowledged that his conclusion, whatever it had been, was
wrong.
"When I married," the Duchess said, "I was the best four-in-hand whip
for a woman in my set. I don't think I am a keen needlewoman, really,
and I know then I didn't recognize a needle by sight. When my little
boys were born I sent to Paris for everything they wore, and I can
remember that I didn't even know for what the little clothes were
intended, many of them, when they came home in my first son's layette.
I have learned to sew since I came here to The Dials. I've been three
months here, now, and I really must have proved a clever pupil, for I
assure you that they tell me I have made some pretty things." As she
spoke she held up the seam she ran, and Bulstrode, who himself
confessed to not knowing a needle by sight, was forced to peer over the
seam and endeavor to find her tiny stitches. He exclaimed:
"Three months! You must have been terribly dull!"
"No."
"You are known," he said, "throughout the countryside--not that I've
been making inquiries, but in spite of myself I have heard--as a
stranger, presumably a Frenchwoman, a widow who will probably buy The
Dials."
"Oh, I shall never buy the place," she assured him, and then abruptly:
"Had you been free to speak of me, what would you have told Westboro'?"
He waited a second, then answered her lightly, but with a feeling which
she did not mistake: "I should have asked him to come and see you run
up that seam."
"He would not have come."
Remembering very clearly how determined Westboro's decision had been,
he did not affirm to the lady his belief that Westboro' would in
reality have flown to her.
At the door, later, she bade him good-bye and appeared to gather her
courage together, and, with a lapse into a simplicity so entire that
she seemed only Frances Denby and to possess no more of title or
distinction than any lovely woman, she said to him:
"Mr. Bulstrode, please don't leave the castle."
"Oh, I couldn't sit opposite my friend at dinner, I couldn't meet his
eyes now, my dear child."
The Duchess touched his arm. "It's sweet of you to call me so. You
are really as young as I am, and certainly I feel an age beyond you.
Please stay."
The pleasure which his visits had been to her had brought something of
an animation and interest to her cold face. Dressed in a dark and
simple gown, her fur stole about her neck, she had this afternoon
followed him out of the house into the garden and walked slowly along
by his side towards the gate.
"Of all the people in the world one would choose you, I think, to be
the friend of..." She caught herself up. "I mean to say, can't you
forget those stupid little ideas of honor and friendship and all that?"
She put it beautifully. "I, of course, will give up seeing you," she
renounced, "but it will be a world of comfort just to feel that you are
there."
As he did not at once succumb to her blandishments, she asked point
blank:
"Promise me to stop on."
"I at least won't go without letting you know of it."
"Without my permission?"
"I won't say that."
"But I'm sure that you mean it," she nodded happily, "and you're _such_
a help."
She was so affectionate as she bade him good-bye, that only at the
little road did he begin to wonder just what help he was. Was he
aiding her to detective poor Westboro'? Was he adding an air of
protection to some feminine treachery?